The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

by Ian Watt (Author)

Synopsis

In this influential study, Ian Watt traces the genesis and development of the most popular of all literary forms, the novel. In his penetrating and original readings of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, he investigates the reasons why the three main eighteenth-century novelist wrote in the way they did - a way resulting ultimately in the modern novel of the present day. The rise of the middle classes and of economic individualism, the philosophical innovations of the seventeenth century, complex changes in the social position of women: these are some of the factors underlying an age which produced the authors of Robinson Crusoe, Pamela and Tom Jones.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Edition: New e.
Publisher: Pimlico
Published: 06 Jan 2000

ISBN 10: 0712664270
ISBN 13: 9780712664271
Book Overview: A classic and the standard text on the origins of the modern novel.

Media Reviews
A major contribution to the subject, in some respects the most brilliant that has appeared...Every page of Dr Watt's admirably written book repays study, as enlivening and enriching as the works themselves Times Educational Supplement An important, compendious work of inquiring scholarship...alive with ideas...An academic critic who in lively and suggestive detail is able to assemble round his novelists the ideas and facts among which they worked -- V.S. Pritchett New Statesman
Author Bio
Ian Watt was Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. He served as Chairman of the English Department (1968-71), and of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature (1977-80), and was Director of the Stanford Humanities Centre from 1980 to 1985. His books include Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979), Conrad: Nostromo (1988) and Myths of Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe (1998). Professor Watt died in 1999.